Sunday, July 27, 2008

WoWGuild Manager Live

People sometimes ask me how I come up with all these ideas for blog posts. Most of the time I don't know myself. But this one I literally dreamt up. Woke up in the middle of the night with a vivid memory of having dreamt about this non-existing game: WoWGuild Manager Live (WML). I played WoW and Football Manager Live the day before, and my brain mixed the two up in my dreams.

In WML you play the manager of a World of Warcraft guild. You start by hiring players of different classes and stats. Unlike the real WoW, you need to pay the players a daily wage, out of a daily income based on your fame, so you can't directly hire large numbers or the best players. Every player has his regular WoW stats and talents, but also mental abilities like patience, punctuality, or lootwhoring. You put together a team, 10 players at first, define a series of tactics, and send them on a raid. Their success in the raid depends on their stats, and how adapted your tactics were to the particular challenge and the player's particular strengths and weaknesses. You can watch the raid, but it is only displayed with colored dots on a 2D map, and in fast forward. But you can press a time-out button and adjust tactics or bring in substitutes if there is a problem. Sometimes there are emergency time-outs, for example if a player left in the middle of the raid, or there is a guild drama random event.

By succeeding in raids your guild gains in fame and daily income. Your player's stats increase due to experience and the epic loot they got (not shown in detail). You can auction players off to other managers, and in regular intervals there are wage auctions where other managers can try to steal your players away by offering them higher wages in a sealed bid system. You might also be forced to sell or let go players because of some players not getting along with another one, or retiring. But if you manage your team well, you'll be able to raid harder dungeons, and ultimately the even harder 25-man dungeons.

I don't think anybody will make this game, I really just dreamt it. It plays just like Football Manager Live, only with WoW guilds and raids instead of football teams and matches. Maybe I'm missing the kind of computer RPGs where you controlled more than just one character, and gave strategic commands to a whole adventuring party. Apart from pets and the henchmen in Guild Wars, that aspect is sadly missing from modern MMORPGs. I'll just keep dreaming.